Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. File.
| Photo Credit: PTI
Endorsing the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, Maharashtra Chief Devendra Fadnavis on Monday (March 31, 2025) said that the policy promoted Indianisation of Indian education system and Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) chairperson Sonia Gandhi should support it.
Speaking in Nagpur, Mr. Fadnavis said, “I believe the education system in India is being Indianised now and NEP stands for Indianisation of the education system. If the education policy that Macaulay brought to enslave our country is being replaced and Indianised, I think no one should have any problem with that. Any patriot will support the NEP. I think Sonia Gandhi ji should know about this more and must fully support the Indianisation of the education system.”
Also Read: What does NEP, 2020 state about languages? | Explained
Thomas Babington Macaulay was a British historian and politician who introduced the Western system of education in India in the 19th Century.
Mr. Fadnavis’s statement came in response to Ms. Gandhi’s opinion piece published on The Hindu on March 31, 2025, titled, “The ‘3Cs’ that haunt Indian education today”. Ms. Gandhi wrote, “The introduction of the high-profile National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, has hidden the reality of a government that is profoundly indifferent to the education of India’s children and youth. The Union Government’s track record over the last decade has convincingly demonstrated that in education, it is concerned only with the successful implementation of three core agenda items — the centralisation of power with the Union Government; the commercialisation and outsourcing of investments in education to the private sector, and the communalisation of textbooks, curriculum, and institutions.”
Ms. Gandhi further wrote that in higher education, the government has brought in the draconian draft University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines of 2025 which have fully written out State governments from the appointment of Vice-Chancellors in universities established, funded, and operated by them.
The Narendra Modi government’s commercialisation of the education system has been happening in plain sight, in full compliance with the NEP, Ms. Gandhi wrote. “As a constitutional guarantee for primary school education, the RTE provided key safeguards to ensure the accessibility of primary schools for all Indian children… The NEP, which generally omits to mention the RTE, seeks to overturn the concept of these neighbourhood schools by introducing school complexes. Couched in this language of school complexes is the large-scale shutdown of public schooling and unchecked privatisation of school education. Since 2014, we have seen the closure and consolidation of 89,441 public schools across the country — and the establishment of 42,944 additional private schools. The country’s poor have been forced out of public education, and into the hands of a prohibitively expensive and under-regulated private school system,” the article read.
On Saturday, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh lauded the NEP and said, “Some people are unnecessarily creating controversy over Tamil and Hindi languages. However, the BJP is fully committed to protecting Hindi and all other Indian languages, and we are working towards that. There is no competition between Hindi and other Indian languages, but rather a spirit of cooperation. Hindi strengthens all Indian languages, and all Indian languages strengthen Hindi. This trend of dividing the country in the name of language must stop.”
Published – March 31, 2025 10:39 pm IST